gooseberryhigh | (no subject)

Who: Bash Lacroix
When: Thursday Night, After Dark
Where: Somewhere Dark, Definitely With Trees
What: In which Bash talks to himself, gets talked to, and yells at trees.

The thing about being an upperclassmen is -

Well, no. There are a number of things about being an upperclassmen. Including, but not limited to: the fact that freshmen are all suddenly strangely small-looking human beings, that his senior project is starting to feel horrifically Real and loomy, and that he's probably supposed to be figuring out what he wants to do with his life in some sort of less than abstract fashion. So that initial statement's misleading. There are many things.

But the thing. This particular thing. Tonight's thing. That thing is that you (for a certain, prefectly value of you) get to go out on night rounds by yourself. Which doesn't really tend to bother him. Not too much. Like - the woods are lovely, dark and deep. (And possibly filled with unspeakable horrors?) Which is cool. And if he minded it, the whole getting back to his cabin thing would be real rough on the daily. But they woods are quiet and the city-bred parts of him (which okay, yeah, are all of the parts of him) want the comfort of sirens and car alarms and people screaming profanities out of second-story windows.

So he talks.

This is, again, not particularly remarkable. It isn't that he likes the sound of his own voice more than he likes other sounds - but when you're the only sound available? You make do with the you you've got. So tonight on Radio Sebastien it's Hits of the Lacroix Twins' Bedroom Circa Late 90s/Early 2000's: Dr. Seuss Edition.

"Too wet to go out and too cold to play ball. So we sat in the house and -" Suddenly, strangely, the words get all caught up in his throat for a second. Skin gone all all goose-prickly and spine straightening and ohgod there's totally someone doing some serious invasion of his deeply questionably small personal bubble right now. This is how he dies. Reciting The Cat in the Hat. "Did nothing at - Nothing at all?"

He lets the question hang there for a long moment (just long enough that he starts to feel ridiculous) and his shoulders have just started to slump back into their usual bad postured slouch when there's a voice in his ear - soft and slurred and sad. And familiar. His nose twitches, some phantom pull making itself known high on one cheek.

So, yeah, maybe he lets out a noise that has some embarrassing similarities to a particularly spirited door hinge. Then a soft and bewildered "holy shit!" squeaks its way past his lips as he pinwheels around, one hand to his chest (heartbeat gone wild and skittery in the space beneath it) and a ridiculous giggle bubbling up and echoing oddly in the open space in front of him.

Shit, he really needs to work on his reactions to blind panic.

"HEY, IT'S OKAY!" he yells out into the nothing, voice steady and sure and loud, despite the last bits of laughter threading their way through the words. Despite the way he's bouncing on his toes and the way he tugs on the ends of his hair, the fluttering of his hands as he shakes them out like they've got electricity zinging through them. "MAYBE NEXT TIME SOME WARNING, THOUGH?"

He scrubs the heel of his hand across his cheek.

"I mean, shit. Do you even like Dr. Seuss?" he asks, voice quieting into a bemused sort of whisper. "Maybe next time let a dude know if you like rhyming." Bash snorts, spins to walk backward for a few paces, adding an absent: "AND YOUR NAME."

To which there's a whole lot of nothing - the trees are all silent and the path ahead is empty and all of the prickly awareness of something watching has settled back into the usual unprickly awareness of the dark and the deep and the quiet.

"Okay. Cool. Once upon a time in Spain," he starts up again, sneakers crunching their way over the leaves.

Less rhyming, this time. Just in case.